Grab Bag - June 2, 2006

This week's edition:


Is anything being done for toons who are not allowed in Leirvik due to their Master Level?

Not at this time, unless you count our adding a new BG this coming patch. Certainly there are a number of you who have made this request, and I've passed it on.

My guild recently moved to a different server, and we could not find a housing area with enough lots to create the village we had on our old server. Will you be adding new ones?

No. Setting up new zones requires a certain amount of hardware, and we can't justify that when the housing zones are not full.

I know that very few guilds get the mansions and villas we envisioned they would when we designed Foundations, and prefer the village set up. We have a lot of feedback from our volunteers on how we could make the larger houses more desirable, and I hope to add some of those requests someday. (Adding a second merchant hookpoint, by the way, will probably never happen, as it's a massive database change and would require insane resource levels.) But our community tells us through all methods of feedback that we should have other priorities at this time.

I have been told by a couple people that stat debuffs (such as strength and dexterity) have some effect in PvE. No one, however, could tell me what those effects were. Are Debuffs beneficially in PvE and if so what do they do?

Mighty Marty says: "The effects are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the effects the spells have versus players. For example, casting a DEX debuff will affect (negatively) a monster's cast times."

The Big Wheel, our class and items guy, let me know that the main difference is that the effects are usually less pronounced on monsters. Fewer factors are considered with the critter code as opposed to the player code.

1.) How often does the auto-promoter run? 2.) Does the auto-promoter work on guilds that are so old and decrepit as to only have one member, (rank 9) left?

Here's the Lord of the Underworld: "1) The autopromoter runs daily, but it does not examine all guilds each day.

2) The autopromoter re-examines '100% idle' guilds (guilds with no active members at all for the last 30 days) every 10 days."

(If you are the 50th level paladin from Igraine who sent this question, and none of the officers from the guild you gave me as your example return, you are scheduled to become the new GM on June 12. The program will send emails to the addresses the officers had on their accounts just in case, so if they log in between now and the 12th, you won't be promoted.)

With the new lines being added, will artifacts be changed to allow access to the classes newly able to use them?

No, we are not looking to expand access to artifacts and their effect on the game in any way.

If bolts are physical attacks, then why do bladeturns not stop them? Or pop the bladeturn?

Because while we set the bold to be treated as physical for the purposes of ABS, we didn't set bladeturn to acknowledge a bolt as physical. Two totally different places in the code.

This is the sort of thing we are discussing as we discuss bolts.

What is the best way to report my Pendragon test findings on the new class changes? I sent in feedback to "class balance". I'd really like my thoughts to reach the folks considering the future of the current patch.

Sending them to the class balance feedback form certainly gets your notes counted - we (and by "we" I mean Herald Minion Richard) make out a spreadsheet showing a breakdown of our user feedback by category and position. Charts and graphs are generated and given to the producers to give them some idea as to what players are thinking.

But if you've got really detailed notes, I'd prefer you simply email me, as it's hard to get nuanced material into a pie chart. (First name at mythicentertainment dot com, as usual.) If you have a bug, you should submit a bug appeal with all the information in game, as that is the direct route to our testing team.

My necro's armor degrades much faster than my other caster's armor. Why is that?

Your pet is considered to be you in the case of armor, and is in melee combat. I am told that the results of our internal testing showed necro armor degrading at the same rate as a tank's.

Been playing a thane for a while now, and I know a lot of other players that play thanes and none of us ever seem to have crit on a spell. Is it possible for any of the thanes spells to crit?

Not without an RA or other sort of bonus-to-crit.

From Camelot's Boss PQ Man, who checked this personally: "List casters are the only casters who crit naturally on spell casts. With RAs, anyone else can crit on their spells. The one exception to this is Valewalkers, who can crit naturally due to them technically being a list caster. This also only applies to DDs. Heals and DOT do not crit naturally, even for list casters, but can crit with RAs."

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Side note: I had an interesting exchange from someone, talking about "softball" questions on the grab bag. I told him among other things that some of the "softballs" are no such thing, but hours of tedium and testing. This question is a classic example of the genre. Sounds like a simple question, no? Plenty of old school players could answer it, and I just did with one sentence. Oh, but the drama of getting to that sentence.

First, I never answer questions without checking with a designer for the intent and a programmer for the code. Conventional wisdom and "everyone knows" has been wrong more often than not, and my approach was beaten into me by repeated doses of egg to my face.

As you coders know, five year old programs created by multiple people have layers like an archaeological dig. Different coders have different attitudes about commenting their work, too. In other words, you have to look in three different places to find all the relevant factors to a simple question, and the third place is by no means obvious to someone who didn't write it in the first place.

Neither the designer or the programmer I work with these days did the original work or the RA design. So the simple question took more than a half hour to look up, and they came back to me with different answers. We brought in one of the coders who did the RAs for a consultation, and tested the results to be sure nothing had changed from our intent due to other changes to the code in the past several years.

This freaking softball took maybe four hours, over the course of two weeks (remember, they're all working on 1.84 and the expansion pack as well as answering my questions). And even if the final answer was the first one, it was the only right way to deal with the problem, because a huge amount of the time my approach turns up a darn bug.

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Ohio denizens! We're coming to you live on Thursday, June 29. Ohio's always one of our best and wildest stops on the tour. (Sorry for the error - my bad entirely.)

The new battleground will allow players from 44 to 50 inside for testing purposes. Our intention is that once we go live, the new BG will only be open for levels 44-49. Speaking of that BG (Cathal Valley), we're planning a Pendragon event to test it out - stay tuned for details. The tentative plan is for Saturday, June 17th.

That's it for me. See you on the frontiers, and if you can't be good, be careful.